


The Immortal Bats of Gotham

by UchiHime



Series: Batman X-overs and AUs [2]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, 亜人 - 三浦追儺 & 桜井画門 | Ajin - Miura Tsuina & Sakurai Gamon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ajin, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Attempted Sexual Assault, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Infanticide, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Postpartum Psychosis, Temporary Character Death, inaccurate depiction of, loosely connect scenes, not really a fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-13
Updated: 2017-09-13
Packaged: 2018-12-27 16:40:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12085056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UchiHime/pseuds/UchiHime
Summary: The Ajin: Demi-Human AU no one asked for...Basically, all the Bats are immortal.





	The Immortal Bats of Gotham

**Author's Note:**

> This is based entirely off the Ajin Netflix series and not at all off the manga because I haven't read the manga.
> 
> Everyone dies, but they don't stay dead. 
> 
> If there's something you feel I need to tag for, please tell me.
> 
> Read end notes for more details about this universe.

**The Immortal Bats of Gotham**

**Bruce**

Bruce dies when he’s eight years old. He’s watching his mother’s pearls roll across the dirty ground of the alleyway, too shocked to fully comprehend what he’s seeing, when a third shot is fired. The bullet hits him in the head. He dies instantly.

By the time anyone else makes it to the crime scene, Bruce is clinging to his mother’s body and crying his heart out. No one thinks for even a second that the blood on his face might be his own.

He doesn’t know what it means that he’d died and came back to life with no wound to show for it. He isn’t even entirely sure he’d died. He doesn’t tell anyone. Not even Alfred. His only real thought on the situation is, if he could wake up from a bullet to the head, why not his parents?

They bury his mom and dad and Bruce goes home with Alfred to haunt the halls of Wayne Manor, a ghost in all the ways that matter.

The next time he dies, he’s ten years old. This time he does it to himself. He climbs out of the attic window and “falls” off the roof.

He wakes up and sneaks back into his room before Alfred can find him and know what he’s done. This time there’s no denying it. He most definitely died and came back. What does that mean? Can he not die? Is he immortal? How is that possible? And most importantly, why him and not his mom and dad?

* * *

 

**Dick**

Bruce has died so many times since starting his crusade. Accidental death after accidental death, poisonings and murders, and deliberate self-induced deaths to “reset” himself after receiving grave injuries. He tries to be careful, but there are risks in this job.

It’s because of these risks that he denies Dick’s pleas to join in his mission. Bruce may be able to wake up after dying like nothing happened, but Dick can’t and he’s not going to put the boy in unneeded danger.

Bruce had made a promise he would do everything in his power to protect Dick. If he could, Bruce would lock the boy up in their home, far away from anyone who could do him harm. But Dick deserved better than that.

And Dick deserved a chance to get justice for his parents’ murder.

Dick might not be immortal, but Bruce could teach him to account for the risks in all his actions. Bruce could train him so that he could do this without dying. Bruce would be at his side to protect him. Dick needed this. He needed justice the way Bruce had needed it when his own parents had died in front of him. Bruce had no right to keep denying him.

Dick dies as Robin within a year. Two Face had beat him with a bat and there was nothing that could be done to save him.

The sound Bruce makes when Dick takes the first breath of his renewed life is almost inhuman.

Bruce is terrified for the boy he’d taken into his home. He knew what the immortality was now. The first confirmed “ajin, demi-human” was discovered in 1990. There was currently less than fifty known ajin worldwide. There was no real evidence of government experimentation on demi-humans, save for grainy videos uploaded to the internet, always taken down within a day, and vehemently denied as being real, but Bruce isn’t convinced.

Bruce had promised he would protect Dick. It is because of this promise that Bruce tells Dick that Robin is done.

Dick, stubborn little bugger, does not listen.

* * *

 

**Jason**

Jason is ten years old the when his mom’s scumbag of a boyfriend kills him.

His mom is high and passed out on their couch, but her boyfriend is apparently feeling randy and doesn’t care about inconsequential things like “consciousness” and “consent” when he’s aching to get his dick wet. Doesn’t even care about the fact that there’s a kid in the room with them.

But Jason does care about his mom’s well being and he’s not about to sit by and watch this asshole take advantage of her while she’s out.

The boyfriend is also Catherine’s dealer, and Jason might not be able to stop the man from providing the poison his mom willingly injects into her veins, but he can stop this. He gives a warning at first, but that gets ignored because Jason’s just a little kid playing at being tough.

He punches the guy in the face. The guy punches him back as casually as if he’s swatting a fly. But that casual punch has enough force to knock Jason down and crack his head on the coffee table. But that isn’t what kills him.

The boyfriend decides that Jason needs to relax and the best way for him to do that is the same way his mom got so relaxed and sleepy. He stabs a needle into Jason’s arm and injects him with enough heroin for a full grown man for feel one hell of a high. Jason’s ten year old body didn’t stand a chance.

The asshole didn’t even noticed he’d overdosed the kid. And that works in Jason’s favor, but if he sticks around, maybe the next time the scumbag kills him, he would pay attention long enough to see Jason come back to life. Jason’s not about to let that happen.

Jason runs away because he knows for fact that he’d died and he knows what that means. It means he’s an ajin, a demi-human. And he’s heard the rumors of the police offering rewards to people who turned in demi-humans. And about what happens to those demi-humans once they’re turned in.

The government says the rumors of inhumane experiments conducted on demi-humans are just the baseless fabrication of the morbidly humored internet. But Jason’s not going stick around to find out for himself if that’s true or not. He’s not about to let himself be sold. Not by this asshole drug dealer. And not by the mom who doesn’t love him enough to stop killing herself by inches.

He packs a bag and disappears into crime alley. Just one more young runaway among many.

He’s twelve when he’s caught stealing tires off the Batmobile. He runs for safety of the building where he’s currently squatting, but the Bat is in hot pursuit. Not knowing what else to do, he summons the black ghost that had appeared after the third time he’d died. He orders the ghost to hold Batman off, but to his surprise Batman has his own black ghost and Jason’s ghost is no match for it.

For a brief moment when their ghost hit each other, Jason is subjected to the images of a young boy standing on this same street long before it was called Crime Alley. He watches the boy cry on a woman’s corpse as police sirens approach in the distance. He knows what he’s seeing in the Batman’s memories and he wonders which of his own memories is the Bat seeing in turn.

* * *

 

**Tim**

Only a week after her son’s first birthday, Janet Drake, having thus far managed to ignore the obvious signs of her postpartum psychosis, took a pillow and pressed it over her baby’s face as he napped innocently in his crib.

Jack Drake, working studiously in his office just down the hall, just so happened to glance at the little screen displaying baby monitor camera hidden in the mobile over his son’s crib at the same moment Janet’s hands entered the frame with the pillow. Abandoning his work, Jack sprinted down the hall and yanked his wife away from their son, his hands gripping her shoulders tight enough to leave fingerprint shaped bruises that would take over a week to fade.

For a long silent moment, Jack stared down at his still son and prayed to a god that he’d long since given up faith in, that he hadn’t been too late. Seconds later, baby Timothy inhaled a deep ragged breath and promptly burst into tears, right along with his mother. With a crying baby on one side of him and a sobbing wife begging forgiveness on the other, Jack Drake did the only thing he could think of.

He led Janet out of their son’s nursery and laid her in bed. Then he looked up the number for a nanny service in the yellow pages before ordering a second plane ticket for the business trip he’d be taking the next day.

Jack endeavored to keep Janet away from little Timothy as much as possible for there on, but Janet was never treated for her postpartum psychosis and this would not be the last time Jack managed to save his son just in time.

It isn’t until five years to the day that Janet first attempted to smother their child, that Jack would learn that he’d never actually managed to save him. A week after Timothy’s sixth birthday, Janet takes a kitchen knife and stabs the boy through the heart. Jack is too late to stop her. He pushes his wife away from his son, yanks the knife from the boy’s chest, and clings to his small bleeding body, unable to think of anything else to do. Imagine his surprise when Timothy takes a familiar ragged breath and wakes up in his arms, the fatal wound in his chest gone as if it was never there.

The stories of immortal men still feels more fantasy than reality despite the recent scientific proof of it. The idea that his son could be one of these so called “demi-humans” is almost too much for Jack to comprehend. His son must be human and normal in order for him to be a suitable heir for the Drake family. And Timothy must be the Drake heir, because there is no way Jack would be able to convince Janet to give him a second child.

Maybe Timothy’s affliction is for the best. It gives him a needed resilience to survive Janet’s harsh brand of love. (And Janet does love their son, it’s just hard for her to show it sometimes. Emotions get jumbled in her brain and she sees things that aren’t there and jumps at shadow and acts without thinking, but she’s always so apologetic and ashamed of her actions. She always begged forgiveness from a son too young to understand what was being done to him.) Yes, this is all for the best and no one needs to know about it.

Jack books another business trip for him and Janet. And mentally prepares another argument for Janet to go see a therapist. Timmy, after all, wouldn’t always be too young to understand that his mother was murdering him over and over.

Tim is ten years old the first time he’s made aware of the fact that he’s immortal. He’d been following Batman and Robin through the streets of Gotham for weeks, but on that night he hadn’t been able to find them early on, so he crouched on a fire escape near one of their regular patrol routes and laid in wait with his camera. The fire escape was attached to an abandoned building. It was rusted and unmaintained. It was just Tim’s luck that it would choose that night to collapse under his slight weight.

His heart is in his throat as the ground rushes up to meet him. His body meets the cement with the sickening sound of too many bones breaking and he’s crushed under the rusted metal fire escape that fell on top of him. His body is too small to be seen under the heap of metal, or maybe just ignored by the jaded passersby. He drowns to death in the blood that fills his punctured lungs, and with an agonizing gasps, he wakes up. A black ghost appears and lifts the twisted metal off of him and allows Tim to pull himself free.

Tim returns home that night without ever seeing Batman and Robin.

**Author's Note:**

> Unmentioned details:  
> 1\. I imagine Tim's "Black Ghost" is a lot like Kei's in the anime in that it is remarkable dense (reason I had him die for the first time while he was really young) and capable of acting independently of him. It's less stubborn than Kei's ghost though.  
> 2\. Pretty sure Tim's ghost also has wings like that one in the anime.  
> 3\. Dick can't summon a Black Ghost. I imagined that if he ever managed to do so, it wouldn't be until after he's become Nightwing. Or even after he takes over as Batman for the first time (that time when Bruce breaks his back.)  
> 4\. Other than Bruce, who died a lot when he was first starting out, Jason has died more times than anyone. Most of those deaths were when he was living on the streets though.  
> 5\. The Joker and Harley Quinn are ajin, but I don't think any of the other Rogues are though.  
> 6\. Damian is not an ajin. But he was probably given Lazarus water in his baby formula so...  
> 7\. If Babs is an ajin, she's hiding it from her dad. So she never "resets" herself after the Joker shoots her, meaning she'll have to heal at a human rate. Which is why she's in the wheelchair.  
> 8\. I don't know if Stephanie is an ajin, probably though.  
> 9\. Cass is an ajin. She's died more times than Bruce and Jason put together. She cannot for a black ghost though.  
> 10\. I am not sure how the Death in the Family story line would work in this universe. Thus I'm not sure how the Red Hood story line would work either.  
> 11\. I never mentioned the ajin paralytic voice because I didn't know how to work it in, but it's a thing that the bat's have to used. Mostly against small time criminals. It's not very effective used against the same people over and over, so I doubt the use it on the Rogues at all.  
> 12\. At some point, all the Bats get good enough at what they do to stop dying doing it. And so, most of the Justice League does not know they're ajin.


End file.
